Underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are unmanned robots that have many marine applications including inspection and maintenance of industrial infrastructure. Before ROVs, in order to inspect an underwater infrastructure (e.g., underwater pipelines), human divers were used; however, using divers raises safety concerns and is expensive. As such, ROVs eliminate many of the safety and financial concerns associated with divers.
Underwater ROVs are usually composed of certain components that need to be enclosed and sealed from water, and others that are required to operate in the water. For instance, ROVs typically include a main hull that comprises a motherboard with an electrical circuit (e.g., microcontroller) that controls the vehicle and a main battery that feeds power to the vehicle. The motherboard and main battery are sealed and enclosed within the main hull. Multiple subsystems that need to operate in the water can be mounted around the outside of the ROV. These subsystems can include actuators, motors, instruments, lights, non-destructive testing (NDT) modules, and the like. The subsystems are mounted to the ROV via tethers to communicate with the master microcontroller and receive power from the main battery. However, the presence of tethers on the ROV creates turbulence and unsteady flow of water around the ROV (e.g., in the hydrosphere) resulting in the decreased efficiency of the ROV's hydrodynamics. Further, the integrity of the main hull of the ROV is hampered by the sealed open holes of the connectors between the subsystems cables and the devices inside the main hull devices. The decreased integrity of the main hull also compromises the depth rating of the ROV. Additionally, ROVs are very expensive to modify due to the required sealing and firm design of the hull to accommodate the subsystems. As such, adding more features (e.g., subsystems) to an existing ROV would require extensive redesign of the vehicle.
The present invention addresses these and other limitations associated with conventional underwater ROVs and inspection protocols.